“It’s really a milestone in terms of making a statement about openness,” said Karen Kornbluh, the U.S. ambassador to the O.E.C.D. “You can’t really get the innovation you need in terms of creating jobs unless we work together to protect the openness of the Internet.”

We agree absolutely with Kornbluh... but feel the need to point out that as she's saying this, the US government has just been exposed for censoring websites with no due process. Meanwhile, Congress is about to move forward with a bill to set up the Great Firewall of America, that will allow the Attorney General to create a blacklist that blocks all access to certain websites.

That seems to go exactly against what Kornbluh says. Basically, she seems to be admitting that SOPA will hinder innovation and hurt job creation by cutting back on the openness of the internet. If only others in the federal government would wake up to the impact of their dreadful plans.

from the but-will-we-fix-this? dept

The quality of patent filings has fallen dramatically over the past two decades, claims a report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).­ The rush to protect even minor improvements in products or services is overburdening patent offices, which in turn slows the time to market for true innovations and reduces the potential for breakthrough inventions they claim.

Of course, the real way to fix this problem is to make the bar to get a patent much, much higher. If you do that, you get less bogus patent apps being submitted, and it makes it easier to reject such bogus patents. One easy way to do this would be to use independent invention as a sign of obviousness, and reject patents where multiple parties all came up with the same thing independently. Unfortunately, no one seems to seriously be considering such an option. And so we're stuck with crappy patents and a giant backlog. To date, the only way that the US has seen to get through that backlog is to approve patents faster with less scrutiny than before. Tragically, this has had the exact opposite effect of the intended response. When you approve more bad patents quickly, you only encourage even more bad patent applications.